Global Positioning System (“GPS”) technology has been widely used to identify positions of objects in applications in the areas of national defense, surveying, public safety, telecommunications, environmental management, and navigation (aviation-, marine-, and land-based navigation applications, for example). The commercial availability of inexpensive, powerful GPS receivers has also made GPS-based technologies, and other location-based technologies, attractive for use in smaller-scale consumer applications.
The Wheels of Zeus™ (wOz™) technology platform, designed to track the location of an asset within a user-defined physical area, is one example of a GPS-based application available to consumers. The wOz technology platform includes, among other things, a “Smart Tag”, a “Tag Detector”, and the “wOz Service”. In operation, the Smart Tag is attached to a person or an object. The Tag Detector wirelessly monitors the location of the Smart Tag within a user-defined physical area. The wOz Service communicates with the Tag Detector via a network to provide various monitoring, tracking, and control parameters—a user may be notified, for example, when the Smart Tag is taken beyond the user-defined physical area.
GPS-enabled asset tracking systems such as the wOz technology platform are not known to identify, or to alert users to, an asset's non-positional (for example, three-dimensional) movements within a monitored physical area—they generally cannot alert users when an asset experiences an unusual movement Thus, valuable information regarding many activities that happen at seemingly innocuous locations or times—some of which signify serious safety threats—may go unreported despite their occurrence wholly within the monitored area. For example, dependents (such as children, pets, or elderly people) may display abnormal or distinctive motion patterns when they are in distress (for example, when falling). Such motion patterns are not detected by asset tracking systems that report information related only to the location of assets relative to a particular physical area.